


Those Left Behind

by NeoVenus22



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:14:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeoVenus22/pseuds/NeoVenus22
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Officially, it's been three hundred sixty-five days.  But for Martha, it's been seven hundred and thirty days, and for this reason, she is not altogether surprised to see Captain Jack Harkness standing in the middle of the hospital waiting room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Left Behind

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: 3x13, 'The Last of the Time Lords'

_when you're slipping in and out of time  
who are you to decide  
which one of us winds up broken for a lifetime?_  
\- "faces" -orgy

It's been three hundred sixty-five days since the assassination of President Winters. But it's been seven hundred and thirty days for Martha, for the few of them from the UNIT ship, and for this reason, Martha is not altogether surprised to see Captain Jack Harkness standing in the middle of the hospital waiting room.

All too aware that she's coming off a thirty-hour shift, and looks like she's coming off a thirty-hour shift, she affects a smile, tired but not without some fondness. "I doubt there's much I could do for you," she says.

His face splits in the grin that's been haunting her memories (in a good way). "Not medically speaking, anyway..."

"So?" she says, grinning back in spite of herself.

"Rumor has it I'm here to see an old friend, and a little birdie told me you were getting off work soon."

"I suppose I should be flattered you're using all of your impressive resources just to follow me."

"Not all of them," he said with a wink. "How does a drink sound?"

Today, of all days, "Good."

A sizable number of women wink at Jack upon his and Martha's entry to the pub, and a number of men, and his favorite drink is already waiting for him.

"So you're an actual doctor now."

"I suppose so." Her own drink, ordered on Jack's recommendation, goes down like something she'd find beneath her sink. She coughs and averts her eyes from Jack's smirk. "Weird, isn't it," she says distractedly, watching the play of images on the television over the bar without registering any of them. They might be important, but she won't realize until it's too late. "Weird that things are sort of back to normal now."

He raises a knowing eyebrow. "Normal?"

"Earth normal. Normal by the average person's standards." The facade crumbles, the laugh slides out of her. "Oh, fine, you win." She drinks in concession. "Still," she says, after a moment, "this planet has seen so much, and it's still so..."

"Ignorant?"

"I wasn't going to say that." She makes a face at the tabletop. "You sound like him."

"Seemed like a good day to."

"I was going to say we had our heads in the sand," she says. "After everything, we still seem so unprepared. There've been actual alien invasions, never mind the Toclafane, and what have we got? UNIT. Torchwood. It doesn't amount to much."

"It's not bad, as defense goes. In the past we've fended off invasions with just one man."

_Time Lord_, she corrects, but doesn't say it aloud. "Yes, but he won't always be here."

"Isn't that why you and I are here?"

Except Martha knows, and probably Jack knows, that the wrong ones stayed behind. "Jack..." she begins, the question playing at her mind for a year now.

Jack's expression says plainly he knows instantly what she's not quite ready to ask, and has been waiting for this since before he'd shown up in her hospital.

Even with that knowledge, though, all she can manage to croak out is, "You and the Doctor..."

Jack just smiles. She can't decide if he's encouraging her or is just going to deflect her pathetic attempts, and that alone infuriates her.

"You followed him to the end of the universe," she says, challenging him to contradict.

Jack plays along. She shouldn't have expected anything less. "Not the ideal vacation destination."

"You carried his hand in a jar!"

"What, you've never kept strange things in jars?"

"You could be serious," she snaps sourly. Jack was the one who'd sought her out, after all, not the other way around, so he clearly has issues with today's date as well. Getting together does them no good if they just gloss over the very topic that kept them apart for a year. Just getting drunk, she knows, solves nothing.

Jack rises to her challenge admirably, wiping all traces of the smirk she'd grown so used to seeing in their brief but memorable friendship. "My inability to die notwithstanding, I'm not crazy enough that I would've stayed on that ship for just anyone. Just like you wouldn't have left it for just anyone."

There it is. The Doctor got into you, crept under your skin, rewired your brain to start thinking it was completely possible and logical to do any number of things that were actually quite insane. And even though Martha was fully in tune with the idea that something was crazy and dangerous, she was flooded with faith and the definite, solid idea that it would be all right. Because the Doctor was there.

"So why didn't you stay with him?"

"Why didn't you?"

"Family. Work." Martha shrugs, although it's hard to lift her shoulders with all of the guilt sitting there, twin ugly gargoyles. "Myself." She raises her head, meets his eyes, hoping against hope she'll see something mirrored there, hoping there'll be a clue as to how to keep going after this. "He knew how I felt... I told him, in as many words. Flat-out said. But he wasn't listening. It's like making conversation in a bank queue. Talking about the weather. You hear what someone says, but the words don't mean anything, because you're not listening. I don't think he was ever listening."

Martha looks up at him, a little afraid to stop talking, because Jack will fill the silence with something, and she's not sure what.

The silence, she decides, is worse. It's understanding, commiserating, and wholly depressing. More humiliating still, Captain Jack Harkness would never slip up and voice his stupid human emotions. Probably never has. She resents his level of control. Envies the way he can duck behind off-color jokes, and never seem truly disconnected, even though he's built the wall. She could never do that. She gives everything, far too easily.

And she does it again, "Do you think he's going to come back?" Jack's gaze sears through her, past the whites of her eyes, the retinas, the corneas, past physicality and straight into her soul. Martha hates sounding dependent, hates the part of her accusing the Doctor of abandoning the two of them when they abandoned him first.

"He always does. Eventually."

"Does it get easier?"

"No."

She sighs, "I would've liked it better if you lied." But in a way, she's thankful. The honesty hurts, digs deep, but she's being given a rare glimpse into the true nature of Captain Jack Harkness, and she's grateful for this vision.

Jack just nods. "Drink up."

Martha drinks. It tastes like drain cleaner, but she's moved past the point of choking and gasping every time it hits her tongue. A moment of silence passes, then stretches into a series of moments, without a stop or a start. This is life for Jack, life without death, an eternity stretching in front of him. She understands now. The future looms in front of her, a straight line without variation. Of any sort. There's no danger. There's no excitement.

"How's your family doing?" he asks finally. Martha latches to this new thread eagerly, glad to get away from the melancholy of her thoughts.

"As well as to be expected. Tish got a new job, working as a personal assistant for some second-rate politician. Glorified coffee-fetcher, really, but at least he hasn't tried to kill her."

"She's cute, your sister."

Martha cocks an eyebrow.

"Was always really sweet to me when she brought me my slop..."

She stretches across the table to backhand his chest. "You leave my sister alone," she says, raising her voice to be heard over his deep chuckle.

His grin borders on the insane. "Hey, now. No time for love, Doctor Jones," he quips.

There is just something about Captain Jack Harkness that makes her defenses want to melt right away. "I thought you always had time," she says, with a grin that is so wholly un-Martha she's nearly embarrassed.

"I make an effort to make time..." he shrugs. "Today, maybe, my schedule is clear."

They could. Very easily, actually, but she wonders how much of it would be genuine and how much of it would be sorrow. Maybe Jack's good at compartmentalizing for the sake of sex, but that's hardly Martha's area of expertise. "The drinks are enough," she says, and he accepts it with the faintest of nods but without a word. Likely they'll pretend the offer was never on the table. In two days she'll be sick and lonely and wish she hadn't said no, wish she could share her life with the only person who might ever really understand

"Drinks are enough."

"Are they?"

"Don't flatter yourself." Martha rolls her eyes. "Besides, I'm sure you've got plenty of people to take my place."

"Plenty, yes. People, not all of them."

"That many aliens still coming through the rift?"

"You could come work with us, find out."

"You offering me a job?" she says disbelievingly.

Jack is endlessly smug. "I'm propositioning you all ways tonight."

"I... I don't think I can." Despite herself, Martha can't help wondering what the Doctor would say.

"You can do more good with us, you know. Better resources, prettier faces, and you can keep all the secrets you want."

"I don't know, Jack."

"Promise me you'll think about it. You've seen the stars, Martha, you've been to the end of the universe and back, and you can't throw that all away to work in a hospital."

"Now you really do sound like him." It hurts, that reminder. Martha doesn't particularly want to let either of them down. She clutches her empty glass for some kind of fortification and looks at Jack. "I'll think about it," she says. "But that's all I'm promising."

"That's all I ask."

That's just plain not true and they both know it. She glances at the TV: water-skiing animals, a murder in Cardiff, a woman that rescues birds with broken wings, can cell phones kill you? The world spins on, beautiful and weird and tragic as ever and she just feels... She can't believe it's been a year.

"An entire year," she murmurs. Martha avoids Jack's eye guiltily; it probably seems like nothing to him, like a breath.

"Let's get you home," he says kindly. She feels a little patronized, but today is a good day for it, she thinks. So she lets him help her to her feet, even though she feels fine, lets his hand linger on her arm as they head for the door. Just one drink hardly seems like anything, but she feels better. The evening breeze hits her. In a few minutes she'll find it chilly, but at the moment, it's refreshing.

"You could call once in awhile," she chastises him lightly, heart not really in it.

"So could you."

He has her number on that one. Martha can hardly complain of loneliness when she's got Jack and she doesn't use him. "All right."

"Don't be a stranger, Martha Jones," he says. His lips land on hers. It might be the closest to platonic Jack has ever been. She finds herself glad of his friendship.

"I'll try."

"Do better than try."

It's only after he's left that she realizes he left no forwarding address, and while she knows approximately where the Cardiff branch of Torchwood is, she's not sure how to get there. The breeze turns cool as expected, and she steels herself against it, tugs her jacket more tightly across her chest, digs her hands deeper into her pockets. Her nails dig into her palm and her knuckles brush against something that definitely wasn't there before. She doesn't recognize the handwriting scribbled across the paper, but as she reads, she vaguely recalls that one time the Doctor told her Jack used to be a con man. She thinks it must have happened when he kissed her. Martha is taken aback that flirtation from Jack Harkness comes with strings attached.

But it seems worth it. Martha re-folds the paper delicately, smoothes the creases, and tucks it back in her jacket for later. They're directions.


End file.
